


Ennen Vanhaa

by onnenlintu



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Kasvatus-verse, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-16
Updated: 2019-03-16
Packaged: 2019-11-19 02:11:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18129575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onnenlintu/pseuds/onnenlintu
Summary: Set after Puolikas Ihminen, with flashbacks to the time between Departures from Keuruu and Puolikas Ihminen. Title from a Sattuma song. Sappy, both figuratively and literally.





	Ennen Vanhaa

“I don’t know that we can expect them to fix _all_ of it”, said Emil. “Given that if Viivi hadn’t taught them about flaming arrows in the first place, it wouldn’t have happened, and given that it’s _our_ friend who taught _her_ …”  
  
Lalli huffed, his breath forming a mist in front of him, and shifted his feet around in the snow. Standing still and waiting really brought home how much his usual “never cold” relied on moving fast.  
  
“... although Onni’s nonsense about how a sauna should really be built _by yourself, over half a summer, so you enjoy it more later_ , is going way too far. I would quite like to wash properly again sometime before April, thank you…”  
  
Lalli jumped up, first onto the lowest tier of the pile of logs, then the next. The third tier was so far just one snow-dusted log, and Lalli walked back and forth along it.  
  
“...although I guess we have to just let them sit for ages after we peel them, so probably we’ll just all be disgusting till, I don’t know, next midsummer probably. I guess we’ll have to really milk how much it was their fault after all, so they’ll feel bad enough to let us all come over and use theirs…”  
  
“There’s enough logs from last year to do the important bits, we don’t actually _need_ the dressing room.” Through the muffled quiet of the deep snow, Lalli started to hear the swing and clink of sled tackle.  
  
“Maybe _you_ don’t. I don’t want to run naked all the way from the house through the freezing cold! Like, where exactly are we meant to put our clothes for after, while we’re waiting for more wood…?”  
  
The sound of jingling tackle filled out into the heavy step and breath of the neighbours’ horse, the level crunching swish of a heavy object being dragged through snow, and the thudding tramp of several sets of feet. From his vantage point, Lalli saw them a few moments before Emil also did, and Emil broke through the mush of repetitive sliding sounds with a wave and loud greeting.  
  
Most of them had been helping the neighbours’ sons remove logs from the forest, taking turns throughout the day. Lalli had seen Reynir at it earlier, and according to Onni he had been bizarrely excited to work with the big trees. Onni had himself complained that seeing the younger lads dragging logs, shrugging off unwise amounts of strain on their back as if it were nothing, was making him feel old.  
  
Lalli was not yet quite at the stage of agreeing with that sentiment. Still, there were aspects of this that reminded him too of the years passing. He had watched Emil get logs onto sleds like that before, putting his shoulder into it with a huff and pleased grin several winters ago, and the memory of him doing this with a smoother face and shorter hair was still crystal clear.  
  
It wasn’t an unpleasant contrast, the memory and the view now, and apparently he wasn’t the only one thinking about it. Emil walked behind the sled with him, following the pressed-down track left by a longer log. “Was the last time we did this together before we built our cabin?”  
  
“It was.”  
  
“Hmm-m.” Emil smiled contentedly and took Lalli’s hand. The little burst of pressure through their mittens was squishy, fuzzy, and short, Emil’s hand falling back to his side again with the smile still lingering on his cold-bright cheeks. “Five years ago?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
*********  
  
The frost coating the trees had turned the forest’s dark profile into a wall of delicate, shimmering white. Emil had followed Lalli along the wider path, and even here where broad branches stopped all but a few beams of the sun, the air had a touch of the shimmer light gave it when it was this far below freezing.  
  
Emil always seemed to take so much joy in getting to physically dismantle something. After Lalli’s initial turn with the axe, he went at the rest of the tree’s trunk with enough vigour to quickly send it crashing down, then started hacking off branches without a second’s rest.  
  
“You really can’t wait to build this cabin.”  
  
“I’m just excited about us getting our own room, is all” said Emil through the short breaths of heavy work. “Don’t _you_ feel like hacking something up, after this much time with no privacy?”  
  
Emil’s cheeks were pink with cold and effort, his shoulders broad with work under his winter coat. The little spikes of frost that had formed in his hair only showed up how shaggy and tousled it had become over his eyes. There was that little twitch of his eyebrows when he turned and said “our own room”, and that hopeful grin before he turned back and struck off another branch with one wide-legged blow. Lalli took the smaller hatchet off his belt and joined in with removing branches. Emil definitely had a point.  
  
*********  
  
The path became wider, turned into fields, and led to the side of the barn. A ginger head popped out of the attic window, and after a moment, everyone right down to small Tuuri spilled out of the front door to start helping. Reynir’s continued level of excitement about large trees existing was a little weird. It did leave Lalli with a shorter turn peeling bark, though, so Reynir being like this clearly had its silver linings. The pile of bark shavings in the snow got taller, and so did the carefully arranged rack of logs in the barn.  
  
“We’ll be back tomorrow to help you start the walls!” Lalli didn’t know why the neighbour boys still told him these things, as if he’d remember who exactly “we” was. Despite Lalli having lived fairly close to all of them for several years now, their near-identical shades of dirt-blond and tendency to all get the same haircut from their mother still left most of them essentially impossible to tell apart. Emil struggled with them sometimes, even. The long-term distinguishing features he’d noticed and quietly pointed out had proved useful to remember.  
  
“Oh. Good to know.” Lalli waved the somewhere-in-his-late teens lad off, pretty sure he’d again avoided making this guy realise he was indistinguishable from his brothers.  
  
“See you tomorrow, Tarvo!” shouted Reynir, for once managing to not accent his words to the point of incomprehensibility.  
  
“I’m Tatu! But yes, see you!” Tatu didn’t seem upset by Reynir mixing up the names again, continuing on his way out with a friendly wave of his own. Still, Lalli supposed, Reynir making social gaffes in advance of you having to do it yourself was another silver lining.  
  
Most of the house seemed to agree that at least the neighbours helping them build the new sauna livened the days up, something this side of the heart of winter apparently needed. Luckily, whatever excitement there was in having the kitchen far too full barely touched Lalli’s routine at all. The forest was still quiet away from the hammers and chatting, and the likes of Onni and Laura were much more useful at carrying heavy things, so the next morning he passed the marked-out space near the old sauna’s charred frame shortly before anyone would arrive to work on it. The old one was still crumbling, sprawling and leaving powdery black streaks on the snow that had fallen around it since it had burned. The space cleared for the new one sat neat and squarish in contrast.  
  
Lalli’s feet carried him quickly past the barn, through fields of snow that seemed alder-bark grey in the first dim light, into the deep shadows of the pines where the sun had not yet stuck its fingers. He checked his traps, saw the light change from flickers through the trunks to flickers through branches, and pulled his hood up against the smatterings of snow that fell as he brushed the foliage. Pausing in a clearing, he looked up. In the cloudberry-salmon sunrise, he could see the beginnings of one of those huge, pale, freezing-clear winter skies.  
  
The tree stump he was squatting on seemed particularly familiar, somehow. The dead pigeon in his hands was the only creature that had fallen for his snares last night, and while idly starting to pull the feathers off it, Lalli pondered why it was that this place seemed meaningful. Oh, yes. It was that he’d been thinking about it only yesterday. Emil had been the one to fell this tree with him, and now it was part of the wall right by their pillows. Lalli left the scattering of feathers around the base of the stump, found that broad path they’d used before still nearby, and walked along it enjoying a little of the light. The great tits were starting to really chitter now, their squeaky little back-and-forth bouncing from tree to tree. Maybe the roof of the sauna wouldn’t be completed in utter freezing cold.  
  
Returning to stash this one pathetic pigeon in the kitchen, he passed the new building site. They weren’t making bad progress. For all Onni’s muttering about too many cooks spoiling the broth, and for all the _“Whose? Where?”_ chattering Lalli could hear passing them, having a dozen people hanging about did make their eventual decisions quick to implement. The narrowed joining sections were being made so fast, producing so many little chips of pine all over the snow, that had it been even slightly warmer Lalli would have been able to smell it at fifty meters.  
  
Lalli’s catch, such as it was, had been put away. He could sleep a little more, if the tapping that carried through the yard allowed. The door of his and Emil's cabin had started to get kind of stiff. Lalli wondered when exactly that had happened. He still remembered having carefully scraped all the edges to make sure it would fit. The other memories of that day felt almost like dreams, soft at the edges as he drifted off to them, but the way they sat in this cabin would leave him forever sure they were real.   
  
*********   
  
Emil took a few steps back, put down his tin of resin, and placed his hands on his hips. “So are we… done?”  
  
“I guess we’ll keep improving it. But this’ll dry soon.” Lalli sealed his own tin, leapt down from the peak of the roof, and joined Emil in taking in the view of it. He’d seen far better-done cabins, and honestly better-done sheds. But these things weren’t that hard to get basically right, and what they’d made would keep them about as warm as they could hope for. He knew, because they’d been sleeping in it for half the summer already.  
  
Emil stayed silent for a few moments. “I mean, um. Is this the … when do we say like, ‘yeah, this is our new place, that’s actually ours and all done’?”  
  
“I guess whenever we want.” None of this was that importantly new, compared to having moved out of Keuruu in the first place. Lalli balanced his brush on the top of his tin for now, and moved to go inside. Emil shifted as if to say something again, stopped, then looked bizarrely nervous when Lalli paused and turned. Lalli stood in place, wondering what on earth could be wrong.  
  
“Can I carry you inside?” Emil blurted it out in that way he often did, when he had to say something he was embarrassed about.  
  
“Oh.” Lalli could not for the life of him work out why he was being asked this, nor why it seemed so worrying. “Do you need to?”  
  
“I, um. You don’t have to let me.” Whatever Emil was angling for, it was clearly important, because the last time he’d had that look on his face was when they'd first started sleeping together. “Sorry, I’ve made this awkward, I’ll just - oh!”  
  
Lalli closing the couple of steps between them, shimmying up into Emil’s arms and wrapping his legs around his waist seemed to solve the awkwardness. Emil grinned from ear to ear, tilting his face up against Lalli’s, and “carrying inside” turned into “trying to carry inside, while kissing”. The next step, of Lalli nearly failing to open the door while off his feet against it, eventually became Lalli only closing the door by being pressed into the other side. The wood at his back still reeked of sweet warm sap, and even in their bed the memory stuck to the smell.  
  
Rituals of the threshold were always important. Emil had been the one who needed to be taught this, most of the time. It was a refreshing change to find that here, Emil had seemingly known exactly what he was doing. Whatever blessing was on this door now, Lalli felt sure it was a strong one.  
  
*********   
  
Lalli woke up from his nap, stretched off the drowsiness, and and approached the building site. That looked like half the walls done already. Maybe Emil would get to wash his hair before spring after all.  
  
“What do you need that for?” Onni had been determinedly napping at another of the joins, chipping away in ever-finer attempts to make it fit his standards of snugness.  
  
Lalli picked up the little chisel. “Our door has warped a bit. And all the tools are out already. I’ll bring it back.”  
  
“I did tell you at the time you should have waited on that wood more.”  
  
Lalli had no doubt Onni had told him that, even if he had no specific memory of it. “Mm. This will work too, though.”  
  
Later, Emil found Lalli on the floor, still painstakingly re-shaping the bottom of the door. “Oh, thank you! I guess we gotta do something about that draft, too.”  
  
“Mm.” Lalli stood and stowed away the chisel. He’d fixed that door well enough. “Hey, come here.”

**Author's Note:**

> Running from the sauna back to your house is fine when you've already bathed, because the residual heat makes you immune to -20 for a few minutes at least. From experience, though, I'd say Emil is right about how it feels to strip off and make the initial run to a really basic no-dressing-area sauna - if you don't want to hang your clothes inside it where they'll get soaked with steam, or outside the door where they'll freeze solid, you just have to leave them in the house and that initial journey out is not so pleasant!


End file.
